"Regardless of whom you vote for, thank you for voting and thank you for taking an active role in our city."
— Campaign letter from Mayor Bloomberg to every city resident who requested an absentee ballot, including one living in Africa Photo: UPI

He didn’t win by much, but you can’t say Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign team didn’t pull out all the stops in grabbing a third term for their boss, including stalking New York City voters around the globe.

A city resident working in Africa told The Post she was startled to find a letter from the Bloomberg campaign in her mailbox the other day.

“It said thanks for picking up an absentee ballot,” recalled the woman.

The letter, mailed before Election Day, concluded, “Regardless of whom you vote for, thank you for voting and thank you for taking an active role in our city.”

Political operatives said it’s not unusual for candidates to target voters who are “permanent absentees,” meaning they live outside the five boroughs and regularly cast ballots by mail.

But the Bloomberg campaign, with more than $100 million out of the mayor’s own pocket, went a big step farther.

It routinely dispatched staffers to the Board of Elections to get the names of 7,600 voters applying for absentee ballots, as well as the 26,000 on the permanent list.

“We sent everyone a letter” before the election, said campaign spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker.

Even if that meant paying the postage to Africa, where Bloomberg’s letter arrived after the Nov. 3 mayoral election.

But most of the other letters found their mark on time.

Records show 21,233 absentee ballots were returned and half — 10,517 — came from Manhattan and Queens, both boroughs the mayor won by comfortable margins.

“It’s smart,” said veteran campaign consultant Joe Mercurio.

“It’s something [Tom] Suozzi should have done,” he added, referring to the Nassau county executive, who is trailing in his re-election bid by a few hundred votes, pending the results of a recount.

In the 1990s, Mercurio twice won elections for then-City Councilman Andrew Eristoff by about 100 votes because he lined up supporters to file absentee ballots.